By Waleed Aly
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Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are not simply the victims of their own crimes and a sadly corrupted judicial process. In a tragic way, they are so much less than that: pawns surrendered for ostensibly greater things. Now that it is done, we can admit the truth we were suppressing – that they never stood a chance. All the videos and the vigils, all the diplomacy and the lobbying, were never going to conjure a miracle. Their lives stood at the intersection of a suite of circumstances that had ordained a course for them. And perhaps most gallingly, those circumstances had nothing to do with them. Their deaths are simply the debris.
It begins with their arrest, and a thing called the Treaty of Mutual Assistance on Criminal Matters. Chances are Chan and Sukumaran had never heard of this, but – their own catastrophic decision to traffic heroin aside – it might just be the single biggest reason they are now dead. That treaty requires our police to help their Indonesian counterparts with criminal investigations; to locate and identify potential criminals. And it's under these arrangements that the AFP decided to tell the Indonesians about the Bali nine's trafficking plans.
They did it in writing in the most explicit terms: "should they suspect that Chan and/or the couriers are in possession of drugs at the time of their departure (from Indonesia, they should) take what action they deem appropriate". Then they wrote another letter telling the Indonesians the dates and times of their flights home to Australia, advising them to make their arrests on that day. And so the Indonesians did what they deemed appropriate. Ultimately, as it turned out, that involved a bullet through the heart.
It's not every day a country's authorities play a key role in having its own citizens put to death in a foreign country. Exactly why we did this has never been fully explained. We know the AFP has the right under the treaty to refuse assisting the Indonesians in cases where the death penalty may apply. We also know they can insist on an assurance that the death penalty won't be applied before they co-operate. But it's true this only applies when charges are pending, and in the Bali nine's case, they hadn't even been arrested, much less come near being charged. This, I can only guess, is the AFP's reasoning. But we shouldn't be guessing. It is a good thing that they'll finally tell their story before a parliamentary committee.
Illustration: Simon Letch
But whatever the technical explanation, they can only underscore the broader reason. This was 2005. Three years after the Bali bombings, three months before London. We were in the throes of the War on Terror, worried about Indonesian terrorist groups and desperate to beef up Indonesian policing. We wanted their co-operation on terrorism, they wanted our co-operation on drugs. The Bali nine fit this bill. In this sense, Chan and Sukumaran are collateral damage in our War on Terror.
That put them at the mercy of the Indonesian justice system, clearly given to harsh penalties and struggling with corruption. At length their only hope would reside not in law, but in politics. Their lives would rest on the whims of the Indonesian president, and the power of Australian diplomacy. Here again, circumstance was conspiring against them.
Joko Widodo is a new president, searching for authority. His win followed a bruising campaign against a former military general with a strong nationalist streak and a sobering human rights history. Thus was Jokowi – the anti-corruption, pro-human-rights candidate – mercilessly attacked for being soft, insufficiently patriotic. And so his early period in office seems to have been all about fighting this perception. Within months he had ordered that three Vietnamese fishing boats that entered Indonesian waters be sunk, and pledged to commence executing drug convicts. Mercy was quite simply not an option for a president obsessed with the politics of toughness for his own domestic purposes.
Hence the summary dismissal of clemency pleas. Hence his failure even to grasp the basics of Chan and Sukumaran's case. When he thundered about the drugs they were bringing into Indonesia, he revealed not only that he had no idea they were in fact leaving for Australia, but that any such facts would disintegrate before the demands of his hairy-chested political narrative.
Executed: Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were put to death in Indonesia.
It takes an enormous amount of political capital to dissuade a politician in that sort of mood. Australia simply didn't have that capital. In fact, we had been systematically torching it under successive governments. These themes are well rehearsed now: suspending beef exports, spying, and our belligerent approach to border protection with scant regard for Indonesia's concerns or even sovereignty. Indonesia's anger has been clear and growing for years now. No doubt some of that rage is cynically confected for domestic consumption, but the underlying sense that we feel entitled to push them around is not mere theatre. In seeking clemency we were asking for a favour – one that would cost Jokowi some skin. And we were asking at a time when they were hardly inclined to give it. That was Chan's and Sukumaran's final disaster.
Perhaps at another time, in another political world, these men would have been spared. Perhaps their comprehensive rehabilitation would have counted for something. But at this time, in this world, they were rendered the most peripheral characters in their own tragic story. Everywhere they went they were in someone's sights. And everywhere they turned was an altar on which they would be sacrificed.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and winner of the 2014 Walkley award for best columnist. He also lectures in politics at Monash University.